Silver Falls - Anne Stuart [68]
Since Stephen Henry wouldn’t have told him, and since putting hands on the old man was probably not a good idea, it suited him just fine to chauffeur the old bastard back to his pilfered house and his highly paid houseboy.
It wasn’t until Dylan, a graduate student with the patience of a saint, was extricating Stephen Henry from the car that his father finally decided to address him directly, smugly assured that Caleb wouldn’t say anything in front of the help.
“You’ve been very quiet, my boy,” he said as Dylan settled him back into the chair. The old man was heavier than he looked. “Are you troubled about something?”
Caleb looked down at him. “I was just wondering about something. When you told Maggie Bannister that lie about David being over here, was it to give him an alibi or you?”
For once he’d managed to shock the old man into silence. “When you figure out what your answer is you can let me know,” he added, climbing back into the car and pulling out into the road without looking. Good thing no one was driving by to smash into, ruining his melodramatic exit, he thought sourly as he drove down the road. Though maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. He had no particular death wish, but things had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.
She must be pregnant. He’d been a fool not to realize what was going on, but the thought of his brother actually breeding had been too far-fetched to even consider in his darkest nightmares. No wonder she refused to listen to him and take her daughter the hell away from there. If she was carrying David’s child she wouldn’t very well bail on him, any more than she would harbor any unacceptable suspicions.
Of course, suspecting the black-sheep brother was just fine. She’d looked at him like he was Jeffrey Dahmer after Maggie dropped that bomb about animal torture. He’d have to thank the sheriff for that little extra. As if things weren’t complicated enough, now his sister-in-law was going to consider him the man most likely to become a serial killer.
Shit. He didn’t mind that part as much as he minded the fact that she was pregnant. It explained a lot about her. The gorgeous, female curves of her body, her pale, almost luminous skin. The fact that she was both attracted to and repelled by him. Hormones run amuck. He couldn’t thank his own reliable magnetism. She was simply knocked up.
Which made everything a lot more difficult. Maggie didn’t believe the serial killer had moved on, and neither did he. He’d love it if he was wrong, if life was just a series of ugly coincidences, if he could just head back to Africa or wherever the bureau decided to send him next and not have to think about what was happening in Silver Falls. Maybe he’d been wrong all this time.
Yeah, and maybe pigs could fly. Maggie might be right, and there’d be no more murders in Silver Falls, at least not for a good long time, long enough for people to forget.
But there had always been long waits in between victims, a studied methodology designed to outwit even the most trained of criminologists. And now there’d been at least three in the last few months. Maybe more.
Maybe David could bring it back under control, maybe he couldn’t. And maybe Caleb should just tell Maggie Bannister what was going on. The trouble was, he didn’t have an ounce of proof. Everything was pointing to him just as easily as it pointed to David, and he had to start thinking there was a reason for it. The crimes that were turning up, the murders around the world. He was willing to bet his life that they happened during David’s infrequent visits to his older brother.
That could point to him just as much as it could point to David. And if Maggie decided not to believe him, which was more than likely given his experience in this rotten little town that had always been ready to accept that the adopted